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What Genie should do is license Drive Image XML from Runtime. It's available. With a little rebranding and the addition of scheduling, partition management and restore CD creation, they would have a competitive product.

I haven't tried the Boot media As these machines are running all the time. I back up the Data nightly, but was hoping to be able to Image the Drives in case of a major hardware failure. When I attempt to install either Program I get a message that the software will not run on this OS.

I take issue with what was said about partitioning being hard. I've used Partition Magic for years with DOS then Windows 98 and now XP. Yes partitioning can be dangerous for the casual user. You should read how lay out your disk(s) first, but this tool is very easy to use and other than the C drive(system partition) you can do partition resizing while you have your Windows running. You command the tool to operate on the system partition while booted in to Windows and then you reboot and it does the actual process before bringing up the Windows sign-on screen. What does this have to do with backups, well I find that if I keep my apps on their own logical disk, and data generated by apps on their own partition separate from the system partition it keeps things nice and tidy for backups and as a side benefit it makes partition compressions much faster. I have used Ghost for years now and its saved my **** more times than I care to admit. I was very disappointed in version 12.0 of Ghost of which I experienced boot problems on my machine, but ghost 10.0 is solid. As a former computer center Administrator I would caution anyone that the only way you will know your backup process works is to test it by doing a recovery. To be ultra safe doing this you should have your system copied to another HD just in case(a back up in itself). This way you'll have confidence that you can depend on your process and always use high quality DVD/CD media if that is what you are using for non HD storage of backups. To be safe you should have multiple media, both DVD/CD and HD, every so often depending upon how much info you are generating that you absolutely can't lose. A typical Ghost 10.0 backup of my total system(6 parttions) takes about 16 minutes to create. I will admit I'm using a RAID 0 WD Raptor disk to do the writing so my time is going to be faster than most people out there.

This thread was not started for the benefit of IT admins. It was created for average users and newbies. Admins don't need backup or partitioning tutorials.

All recent versions of Ghost have been really disappointing to me. They cannot be counted on and are always prompting for activation. Since buying an older version of Ghost is near impossible, I cannot recommend it.

hey, cool tips. I understand the importance of backing up my laptop. I lost my phone couple of days back and lost all contacts, msgs, etc., Now I want to be safe in all the gadgets I use. Thanks for the tips and alerting me